Small Business Twitter Case Studies

When discussing social media for small business clients we tend to bring up Twitter in the conversation. The first question we get from small businesses is, "What's Twitter?". The second question is "How can I generate business from it?". Well there has been several small business case studies released lately on Twitter. Here are just a few highlights on how SMBs are leveraging Twitter.

• @52teas - Offers a different blend of tea each week. In addition, they post alerts to store specials. They stated that they were typically shipping one to two packages every two to three weeks and now they are shipping 40 to 50 packages. They attribute there success to Twitter. Read more


• @namecheap - They set up a Twitter account in December and started to run a trivia contest every hour. The first three @ replies won a credit for one-year domain registration. Their follower count jumped from 200 to 4000 in one month. Traffic increased by 10% to their site in December. They also saw a 20% increase in domain registrations. Read more


• @coffeegroundz - Self proclaims that they were the first to have a to-go order placed through Twitter. The Operations Manager credits Twitter with doubling their clientele. Read more


• @orlandoichiban - This Orlando-based Japanese restaurant is now taking to-go orders via Twitter. They are also using Twitter to promote their specials and events.

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[Source: Twitter Tools, Reviews, & News - eINFO]

Unresponsive Email Recipients? Re-activate Them!

I bet you have people on your email marketing list that have never opened your campaign or clicked on a link or at least haven't in a long time, yet they haven't bounced nor unsubscribed. Don't feel bad we all...

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[Source: VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business]

Spammers Exploit Twitter?

There was some recent discussion brought up by Jason Calacanis (@jasoncalacanis) about a sudden spike in some very high profile accounts. Jason determined that this spike occurred on Feb 11. Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, refuted the claim by stating that this influx was related to the new "Suggested Users" feature when new accounts are created.

It was pointed out that the spike occurred almost one month after the initial release of the "Suggested Users" feature and shows several graphs from Twitterific on how quickly it happened to several high profile accounts. Some state that there is a spammer creating fake accounts and adding these fake accounts to a circle of users, including the spammer's own account. Again this is just speculation. You can read the entire story with the long list of comments about the report at The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers.

Another incident was also reported today from @Minervity. He woke up this morning to find that his account was suspended due to suspicious activity. After an uprising from the Twitterverse his account was restored. Twitter support replied:

"Your account has been restored. It would appear that you have a number of spammers following you and using your material for their own accounts and, as a result, you were caught up in a spam cloud (through no fault of your own) and suspended..."

@Minervity believes that the "spam cloud" is some kind of filter being used to check to see if something was retweeted over and over again.

The post, Twitter Suspended - The Full Story, does not make it clear if these spam accounts were pulling back in his tweets and posted them as their own. If so, it looks like if you get enough of these spam followers you can inadvertently be caught in a spam cloud.

This should be a wake up call for those using the auto-follow feature. Spammers love those accounts. There already has been reports of programs being able to determine which Twitter accounts have this auto-follow feature set up. So you may be prone to get caught up in a spam cloud.

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[Source: Twitter Tools, Reviews, & News - eINFO]

Stimulus Package for Small Businesses - Make Your Pledge Now

A few months ago VerticalResponse partnered with Duct Tape Marketing to provide comprehensive marketing resources for small businesses. Now we're behind another great resource from our friends over at Duct Tape, their own stimulus package for small businesses. Make a...

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[Source: VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business]

TweeterGetter - Ponzi Scheme for Twitter

TweeterGetter recently blasted onto the Twitter scene this month promoting that you can get 15,000 followers in 30 days. Basically you have to follow five Twits (including @garymccaffrey, the man who created the app) and then you hope those five get five more people to follow you and five more people follow them and so on and so on. Very similar to how a ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme would work. Those in early reap the benefits, in this case 15K followers in 30 days! Well the only one benefiting is @garymccaffrey.

At one point today 60 people had joined the "scheme" in a ten minute period. This came out to over 8000 people joining in a 24 hour period. One of my friends tried it out today and submitted his information at 8:00 am EST and by 8:00 pm EST he has a whopping 5 new followers from it. Lets cross our fingers for 15K! The moral of the story is that it is NOT all about the number of followers you have, but the number of real people that you can truly network with and share ideas.

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[Source: Twitter Tools, Reviews, & News - eINFO]

Tweba - Auction Your Stuff Off on Twitter

Tweba (pronounced Twe-bay?) allows users of Twitter to buy and sell items. They provide the ability to post classifieds as well as start auctions. You have 240 characters to describe the item you are selling and you can upload one picture per listing. Tweba will managed listing the item, payment processing as well as track the feedback. To get the details on using Tweba they have a handy "How It All Works" page. I really like the concept!

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[Source: Twitter Tools, Reviews, & News - eINFO]

Email Marketing Guide

VerticalResponse launched our first email marketing guide. It's got a step-by-step process about how to use all of the features of VerticalResponse, as well as marketing tips for keeping your click rate high and your unsubscribe rate low.

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[Source: VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business]

Two Easy Steps To Smarter Email Marketing

Are you tired of talk of the tough economy? As our new leadership says, it�s going to get tougher before it gets better. So now is actually the time to �think outside the box� or at least think beyond what...

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[Source: VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business]

New Features - Reporting

Here at VerticalResponse we work pretty hard to constantly make enhancements to our product. We took a look at your feature requests and decided that our reporting section was in need of some TLC. Here are some of the new...

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[Source: VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business]

How Not To Write a Subject Line

I was recently on an "email marketing resources" site and found some horrifying information that was being given on how to write a great subject line. We all know that one of THE most important parts of an email campaign...

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[Source: VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business]